Laptop becomes unresponsive in sleep mode

[JuoG]

Sleep and hibernate modes don't work on my laptop.

What happens is when the laptop goes to sleep the screen goes black, it shuts down basically, but I can still hear the cooling fan spinning and my HDD working. The laptop becomes completely unresponsive, I can't get it out of sleep. I either have to hold the power button to force it to shut down or it simply powers down on its own after some time, maybe 20-30 minutes(with out the battery being completely drained). When I turn it on, during the booting it tells me that windows did not shut down correctly.

It happens whenever I try to make it sleep through Start or when I close the lid. I made a custom power plan so it doesn't go to sleep at all to avoid this problem when I go afk for a while. Though it's really annoying because when I take my laptop to university I have to turn it on and shut it down after every use. I can't close the lid or it will make the laptop enter sleep and then the problem will happen. This lengthens the time before I can start using my laptop and the time before I can close it because there is no standby mode.

I doubt this is a problem with power settings. Hybrid sleep is off and every other settings seems to be properly selected.

I don't know if this is a driver issue. I keep my video card's drives up to date. So the problem should had eventually went away after an install of a new one. Could be my LAN driver and my wireless card does loose connection and have issues with it's drivers not working properly at times.

I read that there could be a windows update problem. For example the kb976902, that was suppose to be installed before SP1, caused the same issue to one guy 2 years ago(I bought my laptop maybe 4 months ago btw) but he fixed it with system restore. I don't see that update installed on my windows nor could I find any information related to other updates with this problem. Also this update would had been installed at the very first day I installed windows and then went though updating it till there we're no updates available, which means I would have to use a restore to a point where I installed windows 4 months ago. Well system restore only gives me points up to the past month.

The only thing I'm thinking about to maybe fix this is to reinstall windows and then update it slowly and see when in the update process I come across this problem again. As far as I remember, when this laptop came with linux and I installed windows, the very first time I used it with windows on it, sleep worked fine. I tried reinstalling windows maybe 2 times, at the end this problem was always present.

Thought I'd rather not go through this painful process, at least not right now, as I need this laptop to do important work for the rest of the month. Especially since I'm not certain if what I'm considering to do will work. So I'm hoping that maybe someone better knowing or just a person who has come across this issue will help me fix this. Hell, maybe this laptop simply can't sleep, maybe that's why it came with linux. I barely know anything about linux. Anyways, thanks in advance for help. If I won't find a fix to this till the end of the month I'l just reinstall windows and see what that gives me.

 

[4wd]

A few things to test out:

How does it behave if you disable sleep and use only hibernate ?

Test memory > http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105647-ram-test-memtest86.html?filter

Run SFC > http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1538-sfc-scannow-command-system-file-checker.html?filter

 

[JuoG]

A few things to test out:

How does it behave if you disable sleep and use only hibernate ?

Test memory > http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105647-ram-test-memtest86.html?filter

Run SFC > http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1538-sfc-scannow-command-system-file-checker.html?filter

Hibernate has the same problem.

Going to test the other stuff now...

EDIT:

Ran memtest for 1 pass, no errors. SFC found nothing wrong. I'll run more passes of memtest over ngiht.

 

[JuoG]

Went through 14 passes of memtest and no errors we're found.

Side note: My OS is 64 bit and I only noticed tests bering ran up to 32 bits. And the 86 thing tell me it's not ment for 64 bit. Is there a memtest version for that?

 

[4wd]

Hello, reason I posted was one of my HP's (quite old) has a very similar problem, it wont awake from sleep, with the fan at full speed. But hibernate works fine. As ram, hd & os are ok, I suspect some motherboard or processor related problem, and this may be the case for your Acer as well.

You've done the suggested tests, and sorry I can't be of more help, but maybe worth to read or post on the Acer support forums > http://community.acer.com/t5/Acer-Forum-Discussions/ct-p/boards & search for sleep related problems, seems there are many experiencing the problems.

Good Luck

 

[sumandeb6888]

1. have you checked harddisk turn off time @ Control Panel\System and Security\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings
2. may be a you have problem with you new video driver try a old driver or if you have a driver dvd then use it
I think video driver cause of all that, I got with nvdia 320.49 whql certified driver.

 

[JuoG]

Thx, 4wd. I'll poke around in there. I hope that I don't have some faulty model problem.

Sumandeb, The hard drive is set to turn off when afk after 10-20 min, depending if the laptop is plugged in or not. And besides, it's not just the HDD, it's also the fan. There's more stuff being active than just the hard drive when it gets stuck at sleep.

As for the driver you mentioned. I think that's the current one I'm using. But I updated to it maybe a week ago. The problem I have though has been around for months. That particular driver definitely did not cause the issue, the ones I had before couldn't had been the problem either, to my mind, as I have updated the gpu driver multiple time. You'd think that after one of the updates, eventually the problem would had passed, right. Unless every driver I install has the same issue in it's code or whatever it can't be a gpu driver problem.